Current Affairs

March 01, 2011

Two stories from today's papers. Here's the Guardian's 'hilarious' faux Q&A with itself on the topic of Blair and Gaddafi:

I thought Our Tone had denied the Gaddafi family's claims to friendship with him? Well, yes, you would, wouldn't you? But Tony probably harbours some warm feelings since he was in charge when Libya agreed to moderate some of its policies and preferred modes of government in 2004.

Oh, yes, that's right. That was in the wake of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, wasn't it? What's your point?

It was when Gadaffi looked around and saw what the UK was prepared to do to bigger, better equipped countries and decided that dictatorial discretion was the better part of valour, badmouthed terrorism for a bit and let some oil companies back in. Doubtless one of the many positive ramifications Tony saw when he conceived his plan to follow wherever Bush led. Honestly, the glass is always half empty with some of you folk, isn't it? I sometimes worry that the poor man is doomed to be misunderstood forever.

This wretched little squib typifies the paper's reporting and editorial on this subject. Indeed, in its mix of personalised poison and adolescent self-loathing it's representative of much of the British media, at least whenever the subject is something to do with the Blair years.

Now here's the New York Times, in a front-page report written by one of its most experienced and respected journalists, David Sanger:

Today, with father and son preparing for a siege of Tripoli, the success of a joint American-British effort to eliminate Libya’s capability to make nuclear and chemical weapons has never, in retrospect, looked more important.

Sanger's report is worth reading in full. Gadaffi and his son came to feel that the West charmed and steamrollered them into a bad deal; that they gave up a lot and got very little in return. They were right.

As part of it, Gadaffi surrendered thousands of chemical shells. If he still had them, do you think he would hesitate to use these against his own people? Even if he didn't, the very fact of their existence would strengthen the dictator's hand immeasurably in his struggle to cling to power.

Our former Prime Minister's part in the 2004 negotiations with Gadaffi is something we should feel good about.

June 03, 2010

I never thought I'd say it, but this post by Clive Crook is very good indeed. In fact I was about to write a similar thing myself. Here he is:

Apparently it is a great idea to elect a president who is calm in a
crisis, except when there's a crisis. Then what you need is somebody to
lead the nation in panic -- or, as Maureen Dowd
put it, to be "a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting [sic]
what Americans feel so they know he gets it." What the nation needs at
times like this in fact is a daddy who will stop being so remote, and
make everything all right. You think I'm exaggerating? Dowd:

Oddly, the good father who wrote so poignantly about growing up without a daddy scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency.

The paternal aspect of the presidency. We are all Malia now. "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

The oil plume has precipitated a secondary spillage - a massive gushing of nonsense from America's senior pundits. Dowd's column is bad, though it's not quite as embarrassingly, don't-know-where-to-look bad as Peggy Noonan's (for whom, as readers from the campaign will remember, I have a high regard). Noonan, after criticising the president for being too pro-government, thinks that Obama's failure to prevent or fix the mistake of a private oil company is evidence of damning incompetence.

As Crook says, even normally loyal people have been spouting pollutants. Ed Rendell (the Democratic governor of PA) said "Bill Clinton would have been down there in a wetsuit" which - once you get past the image of Bubba in a wetsuit - points up what a load of patronising guff this is. Yes, say the critics, we know that such crass displays of completely irrelevant "action" won't do anything to help stop the leak - but the voters are so stupid they need to be deceived.

It's not just pretend "action" - the pundits want the president to do pretend emotion too. Emoting won't stop the leak either. Nor will it help Obama. If there's one thing that people like James Carville ought to know, it's that a politician who tries to be someone he's not forfeits the respect of voters (yes I'm looking at you, Al Gore, though I'm sorry to hear about your divorce). You think Obama's a bit aloof, a little cool? Well maybe, but that's the guy that got elected. He is who he is - and it's to Obama's great credit that he hardly ever pretends otherwise. Now let him get on with the job, and judge him by results.